I use an older version of Calibre that has a fairly robust plug-in to remove DRM. I use it to remove DRM from all my ebook purchases. That plug-in isn’t supported in newer versions of Calibre so I don’t upgrade.

Roxy’s Arcade in Cambridge, MA uses tokens and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I also know a few places in MA with pinball machines that take quarters and I’d be surprised if they changed.

We’re in northeast MA. Here’s the theater we just found.

When my wife and I break down and go to an AMC theater we always plan to arrive 30 minutes after the “start time”. We still catch a trailer or two before the movie actually starts.

We just found an “art house” theater about 30 minutes away and saw Marty Supreme there last night. The theater probably seats about 80 people, the screen is maybe 15 feet wide. The sole guy working there (the owner maybe) was very welcoming, and concessions were reasonably priced. Two tickets & some snacks were still under $30. The guy also went up front to welcome everybody and point out the restrooms that were off to one side of the screen for those of us who had never been there before. Then he ran up to the booth to start the movie. Two trailers, no commercials, and the movie started. We’ll definitely be going back there.

I worked on a memory manager back in the days of DOS & extended memory overlays. The original author liked to refer to blocks of memory as “cookies” and temporary variables as “handy”, among other things. My favorites however were a flag identifying memory corruption as “shit_cookie_corrupt” and a panic function when it couldn’t recover that was called ohShitOhShitOhShit().

I feel like the employees at many theaters these days just don’t care if you bring in your own food.

My wife and I also occasionally see imax movies at a theater that’s part of a furniture store. The store also has an ice cream shop & burger restaurant. That theater is more than happy to let you bring in food from those places.

In the original.

Do younger audiences even get the instant video gag?

It’s low enough orbit that a space shuttle mission went to repair it shortly after it was launched.

Not at all surprising if the claims of quotas of something like 3000 arrests a day are accurate. They’re obviously going after the low hanging fruit given the pressure to fill that daily quota.

Reminds me a bit of Theranos. “Pay no attention to the man (or woman) behind the curtain”…

Gary Plauche is another person who took justice into his own hands over the kidnapping and rape of his son back in the 1980s.

Plauche learned that the suspect was being flown back to town in police custody, and figured out the flight he was on. He waited at the airport, pretending to be using a pay phone. As the suspect was escorted past him he walked up and shot him in the head at almost point blank range. A local TV station caught it all on camera and I think you can still find it if you search for it.

Plauche was ultimately convicted of manslaughter but was given a suspended sentence, probation, and community service. No jail time.

I think the trailer would have generated far more interest if it stopped at showing Rocky’s “hand” and didn’t show all of him.

I managed a research cluster for a university for about 10 years. The hardware was largely commodity and not specialized. Unless you call nVidia GPU’s or InfiniBand “specialized”. Linux was the obvious choice because many cluster-aware applications, both open source and commercial, run on Linux.

We even went so far as to integrate the cluster with CERN’s ATLAS grid to share data and compute power for analyzing ATLAS data from the LHC. Virtually all the other grid clusters ran Linux, so that made it much easier to add our cluster to its distributed environment.

That sequence, to me, is just a modern take on the underwater scuba diver battle in Thunderball.

Reminds me a bit of how South Park parodied Marvel & streaming services a few years ago…

“Netflix, you’re green-lit. Who am I speaking with?”

How do you decide which open source projects are worthy of taxpayer money, and how much does a given project get?

I have a couple projects I’ve put up in GitHub as open source. Would they qualify? Or are you just talking about well known open source projects like Linux?

Snow piles on the sidewalks but green leaf-filled trees off to the left & in the background. I live in the Boston suburbs and you would never see that much greenery & snow at the same time. Somebody didn’t do a good job with their set dressing…

An extended scene of her dance fighting would be fun to see.

I just remember that the illusions in the second one were so absurd that there’s no way they could have been done live, much less in front of groups of people. When the basic premise of a movie doesn’t work then the whole thing ends up being cringeworthy.